Van Gogh Was Shot by Teen Tease in Boozy Mishap, Book Claims

By Martin Gayford -
Oct 18, 2011

The authors of a new biography of
Vincent van Gogh have a radical theory.

In “Van Gogh: The Life,” Steven Naifeh and Gregory White
Smith question whether the great artist really killed himself,
as has always been believed. Instead, they suggest that perhaps
he was the victim of a shooting accident.

How seriously should we take this suggestion? It has more
plausibility than the idea, proposed a while back, that Van
Gogh’s ear mutilation was caused by Gauguin attacking him with a
fencing foil. Naifeh and Smith point to genuine anomalies in the
evidence and cast some doubt on the standard version of Van
Gogh’s death. Still, there are reasons to be skeptical.

The accepted account of Vincent’s death, until now, has
been that of his friend Emile Bernard soon after the event. He
wrote that on July 27, 1890, the painter walked into the
countryside outside Auvers, in northern France. He leaned his
easel against a haystack, and shot himself with a revolver.

The bullet went through his upper abdomen without hitting
his heart, and Van Gogh staggered back to the inn where he was
staying. His landlord, Gustave Ravoux, found Van Gogh lying in
bed with his face turned to the wall. He died in the early hours
of July 29. Almost his last words to his brother Theo were,
“This is how I wanted to go.”

Missing Weapon

In an appendix to their book, Naifeh and Smith raise a
number of valid objections to the received version. The majority
of gun-shot suicides aim for the head not the heart. There was
no clear evidence as to where Van Gogh was shot or how he got
hold of a gun. Most oddly, both his painting equipment and the
weapon vanished, almost as if someone had removed the evidence.

They also have a candidate for the guilty party: Rene
Secretan. As teenagers, Rene and his brother Gaston had known
Van Gogh during his brief stay in Auvers. Gaston liked to talk
to him about art, 16-year-old Rene liked to tease him (putting
chili on the dry paint of his brush for example, which he sucked
while at work). And he had a little pistol.

An art historian had picked up rumors in Auvers that some
boys had shot the artist accidentally. Interviewed in old age,
Rene said that Van Gogh had stolen his old gun, which “went off
when it felt like it,” but not that he had been involved in the
shooting. As the authors suggest, in a meeting between a
possibly drunk and angry artist and an adolescent with an
ancient firearm, anything could have happened.

Unstable Vincent

True. The trouble is that anything could have happened with
Van Gogh at any time. He was mentally unstable, and acted in an
unorthodox manner even by the standards of the unbalanced.
Mutilating his ear was a highly unusual act. One wouldn’t expect
him to shoot himself in a standard fashion.

Naifeh and Smith’s reconstruction implies a cover up that
involved Van Gogh himself. That’s possible. He seems to have
wanted to die. It’s also possible that Vincent himself couldn’t
remember what had occurred, as he often didn’t after his --
increasingly severe -- attacks of derangement.

Some of his reported death-bed remarks are ambiguous: “Do
not accuse anyone; it is I who wanted to kill myself.” That
could hint that he was shielding someone, perhaps it was Ravoux,
for stupidly providing a pistol. Ravoux’s daughter, again many
years after the event, said her father had lent it to the
painter.

The most telling oddity is that missing gun. Any detective-
story reader would wonder about a suicide without a weapon.
Still, the best verdict on the new hypothesis is the Scottish
one of “not proven.” It’s conceivable that Secretan was
involved in some way. Yet it’s also plausible that this man who
already had injured himself in a strange and potentially life-
threatening fashion simply did it again.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News, and author of “The Yellow
House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles.”
His most recent book is “A Bigger Message: Conversations with
David Hockney.” The opinions expressed are his own.)